Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Internet Of Things and Process Yields Big Dividends Together

Combining the Internet of Things (IoT) with process will be a big deal throughout the next 5 years or more. I have already seen the benefit of the combination of the two of these, even in early days (see the two case studies highlighted below). The obvious use of IoT and BPM is in the traditional sense and respond design pattern, but there is more to the Process of Every Thing (PET). The IoT has three basic interactions with process.

Incoming Signals and Patterns:

Processes can act on any signal or patterns either through internal or external complex event processing (CEP) technologies. Right now, the number of signals and patterns that processes have to deal with are pretty low in number today, but the prognosticators are predicting at least an order of magnitude in the number of incoming signals and patterns. This is the traditional sense and respond design pattern, which is reactive in nature.

Outgoing Signals:

Processes can direct or orchestrate various varieties of resources from machines to people. Also smart processes can run predictive analytics to send out signals to any of these resources that can act independently or in collaboration with other resources. In this pattern the process is the proactive initiator of the need for resources to respond.

Interactive Behavior:

In the situation of interactive behavior the process can sense or emit signals interactively. In advanced situations resources can collaborate in a machine to machine (M2M) fashion, a human to human fashion (H2H), a human to machine fashion (H2M) or a machine to human fashion (M2H). all of these styles can interact with each other to accomplish business outcomes.

Net:; Net:

The type and amount of intelligent business operations that can be created by the combination of process and the internet of things is now being expanded. This is one of the key new enablers in the digital organizations tool box to optimize operations and raise more revenue.